Martin Fleischmann

Martin Fleischmann, who has died aged 85, was a Fellow of the Royal Society
once regarded as one of Britain’s most original electrochemists; but in 1989
his reputation, along with that of a colleague, Stan Pons, was seriously
compromised after they stunned the scientific world by announcing they had
achieved nuclear fusion in a glass jar.

Martin FleischmannPhoto: CHRISTINE BOYD

6:01PM BST 09 Aug 2012

Fusion — the nuclear energy process that powers the sun — relies on Einstein’s discoveries that matter is a form of frozen energy and that if atoms of a light element such as hydrogen are squeezed together hard enough they will fuse to create atoms of a new heavier element, causing the release of fabulous amounts of energy. For years scientists have tried to find ways to control this explosive process — and failed. The temperatures thought necessary to make atoms fuse — hundreds of millions of degrees Centigrade — are sustainable for only a few seconds.

In 1983, working at the University of Utah, Fleischmann and Pons, his former research student, had the idea of trying to achieve fusion, through electrochemical means, at room temperature.

The experiment they devised was, on the surface, simple enough. Beginning with a mixture of lithium and heavy water (a form of water made with deuterium rather than ordinary hydrogen) in a glass electrochemical cell, they then inserted two electrodes, a negatively charged electrode made of palladium and a positively charged electrode made of platinum, and passed an electric current through the solution. They reckoned that deuterium atoms might cram into the negative palladium electrode and fuse.

They carried out the experiment in a basement laboratory, and Fleischmann later recalled the morning in 1985 when he entered the lab to find a huge hole in the workbench, and underneath, in a shallow crater in the concrete floor, the remains of his experiment which had, until then, been fizzing idly for several months without incident. The meltdown was significant because, according to the scientists’ calculations, it had involved the emission of far more energy than was available from chemical processes alone. For Fleischmann and Pons, there could be only one cause: room temperature or “cold” nuclear fusion.

At a press conference held on March 23 1989, the two men announced that they had sustained a controlled nuclear fusion reaction in a glass jar that generated four times more energy than they put in. Their announcement — implying the discovery of a potentially “inexhaustible source of energy” — was among the most powerful scientific claims of the last century. The chemists became cover stories on Time and Newsweek.

But after Fleischmann and Pons announced their results, leading laboratories, including Harwell, MIT and Caltech, tried to reproduce them, but failed. There were sporadic sightings of excess heat, but, crucially, there were no telltale signs of nuclear processes, notably subatomic particles called neutrons.

As failed attempts to replicate the results piled up, scepticism turned to hostility. A report from the US Department of Energy found no evidence for the effect, and the two scientists were pilloried at a meeting of the American Physical Society in May 1989. It got worse. In 1990, in his book Too Hot to Handle, Professor Frank Close, head of the theoretical physics division at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, set out to ascertain whether the cold fusion work of Pons and Fleischmann was “a delusion, an error or a fraud” and found evidence for all three. In 1995 the Italian paper La Repubblica accused the pair of fraud. Pons and Fleischmann sued — and lost.

Many scientists berated the two chemists for publicly announcing their results before having them published in a peer-reviewed journal; and in this, at least, there was some agreement. Fleischmann always insisted they had no choice but to announce their results in public, because, having spent $100,000 of their own money on the quest for cold fusion, they had to apply for a research grant, and during the process discovered that a similar line of research was being performed by a physicist at Brigham Young University.

When officials at the University of Utah (which was seeking funding for a National Cold Fusion Institute) heard of the competition, Fleischmann claimed, he and Pons were stampeded into applying for a patent and calling a press conference. “It was a very unfortunate time to try to float the idea,” he conceded.

The whole debacle was hugely embarrassing for the University of Utah, whose physicists, it transpired, had been excluded from the experiments. As rumours began to circulate, some had voiced their misgivings, only to be dismissed by university officials as suffering from “sour grapes”. Campus wags dubbed the episode “Heavywatergate”.

But Fleischmann and Pons refused to accept that they might have got it wrong, and some scientists continue to support the pair. In 2009 Mike McKubre, an electrochemist at Stanford Research Institute, concluded from his attempt to duplicate the “Fleischmann-Pons Effect” that there was “heat production consistent with nuclear but not chemical energy”. But most scientists remain sceptical.

Yet Fleischmann continued to hope, observing: “The New York Times said that you cannot make a heavier-than-air machine fly the day before the Wright brothers took off.”

Martin Fleischmann was born in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czechoslovakia, on March 29 1927. His mother was a Roman Catholic. His paternal grandfather, an orphan, was adopted by a Jewish family called Fleischmann. His father was an anti-Nazi lawyer.

When Fleischmann was a boy, he and his family got caught up in the Nazi occupation of western Czechoslovakia in 1938 but managed to escape — twice. The first time they were driven across the border into the unoccupied part of Czechoslovakia by a First World War comrade-in-arms of his father. Then, after the Nazi occupation expanded, they fled to England . It was a close-run thing: “We all got on the train in Prague and came to the Dutch border,” he recalled. “Then the Germans cleared the train of all refugees. We were in the last coach, and my father said, 'No, sit tight, don’t get off the train’, and the train pulled out of the station. So that’s how we got away the second time, and arrived at Liverpool Street Station with 27 shillings and sixpence between us.”

Several years later Fleischmann won a scholarship to read Chemistry at Imperial College, where he developed an interest in palladium and hydrogen and went on to take a doctorate. He taught at King’s College, Durham University (now the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), and in 1967 was appointed Professor of Electrochemistry at Southampton University, where he built up the department, earning it an international reputation. He served as president of the International Society of Electrochemists from 1970 to 1972.

In 1974 Fleischmann played an important role in the discovery of the Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering effect (SERS), and in the 1980s he developed the ultramicroelectrode. Among colleagues, he had the reputation for generating lots of ideas, testing them “quick and dirty” to see if they might lead somewhere, then letting others refine them.

In 1979 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s medal for electrochemistry and thermodynamics; in 1985 he received the Palladium Medal from the US Electrochemical Society. A Royal Society fellowship followed in 1986.

He retired from teaching in 1983 and, it seemed, had nothing left to prove when he and Pons exploded on to the front pages in 1989.

In 1992 the two men moved to France, working on cold fusion experiments in a laboratory near Nice. But in 1995 Fleischmann returned to Britain, admitting that he and his colleague were no longer on speaking terms. The laboratory closed in 1998. Pons was later reported to have taken French citizenship and to be living as a recluse.

Martin Fleischmann married Sheila Flinn, a painter and potter, in 1950. They had a son and two daughters.